Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous & the Notorious

By Alix Strauss

Kurt Cobain, Anne Sexton, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Hitler . . . all famous, some rich and powerful, some beloved, some abhorred. But when life and circumstance got to be too much, each headed for the exit door. Sigmund Freud overdosed on morphine. Dorothy Dandridge stripped naked and swallowed a handful of antidepressants. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself while talking to his wife on the phone.

These are the lonely personal nightmares behind celebrity suicides—the deaths and their causes are as diverse as the victims themselves. In Death Becomes Them, Alix Strauss bids each one a final good-bye while examining the last days and the unbearable incidents that drove these notables to end their lives. She decodes their notes, touches on their accomplishments, and delves into the methodologies of their deaths using autopsy and police reports and personal photos. Strauss also explores the morbid curiosity that feeds our fixation with famously tortured souls and provides lists of other controversial, bizarre, and poorly executed suicides in this mammoth tome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061959356

Alix Strauss

Alix Strauss is a lifestyle trend writer who appears on national morning and talk shows. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Time, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. She is the author of The Joy of Funerals, Have I Got a Guy for You, and Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious.

Book preview

Introduction

Unearthing Greatness

In the winter everyone is matted down in thick wool coats as we stand in a huddled mass of sniffles and tears. In the summer the warm air rings full of sorrow as mourners sigh in sadness, cotton jackets and black dresses blowing in the breeze. To me, it doesn’t matter what season a funeral takes place, I enjoy them just the same.

Thus began an article I wrote for the Lives section of the New York Times almost a decade ago. I’m as fascinated by funerals today as I was then. I blame my odd attraction to death and memorials on my being an only child—actually, the only only child in my family. For as many generations as I can trace back, everyone has had several children—except for my parents, who decided to have just me. Growing up, there were no holiday dinners spent bonding over burnt turkey and overcooked stuffing, no long-distance, late-night phone calls, no group vacations with family members. And so funerals became my only chance to bond with my relatives, many of whom I’d never met. Rather than a solemn event, I regarded them as reunions.

Paying respect at a relative’s home became like trying to find a secret stash of candy. I couldn’t help but inspect each room, search through the cabinets and dresser drawers, peer at scrapbooks and photo albums filled with old Kodak memories. I snooped in the hopes of finding answers to who they were; I searched for something that would connect me to them. To make me understand. It is the Where do I belong? and Where do I come from? that was missing from my life. This longing for a connection to someone or something is a feeling I have never been able to let go of.

Funerals are an often misunderstood societal phenomenon. The topic, once considered forbidden or taboo, has now become trendy. As a culture, we are obsessed with death. As a population, we connect with one another by sharing the same experiences. Misery loves company, and company is what we crave no matter what our nationality or religious beliefs. It’s why we can bond instantly with strangers as we stand swaying during an all-night vigil, lit candles illuminating our faces and the faces of our new acquaintances. Kurt Cobain’s public vigil was held at Seattle Center’s park and drew approximately seven thousand mourners. Prerecorded messages by Courtney Love and Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic, were played. Love read portions of her husband’s suicide note to the crowd and, at the end of the ceremony, gave away some of his clothing to those who remained.

Years later, these moments will become our earned badges of mourning memory, which we will share at bars, cocktail parties, and random events while reminiscing about the departed, sharing where we were at that moment Ernest Hemingway shot himself; when Diane Arbus filled a tub with warm water, swallowed a handful of barbiturates, and then slit her wrists; when Spalding Gray went missing, and when they fished his body from the East River two months later. It is the I was part of that, I was there that we yearn for.

We are also addicted to the drama. We crave their stories the same way they craved their pills, liquor, coke, and heroin. We want to understand the sadness they felt and the depression they couldn’t live with. Our insatiable preoccupation with celebrities has been heightened thanks to our morbid fascination with how they died. Add a suicide, and our quest for more is as strong as our need for air. As tempting as a letter marked Do Not Open.

And there is loss.

We have indeed lost something great and historical, important and special, in each, be it a rock star or writer, poet or politician, activist or artist, singer or starlet.

Why do we love these tortured souls? What is it about their suicides that is so intriguing? Did they achieve celebrity status for their body of work or did they become even more famous, reaching a higher iconic status, only after killing themselves? Vincent van Gogh sold just one painting while alive. After he killed himself, he and his art became legendary.

Long ago, self-murder was often viewed as a noble way to defy persecution while receiving notoriety for standing up for one’s principles. Think Socrates, Cato, and Seneca, each of whom chose suicide as a way to free himself. But times have changed, and now suicide can be a fast track to fame. Instant publicity forever encapsulated by a signal event.

Along with being a captivating overview of suicide, this book will delve into twenty memorable ones. Each death is as diverse as the person who killed himself. Some are tragic: Dorothy Dandridge was found naked on her bathroom floor, a handful of antidepressants swimming in her system. Others are bizarre: Hunter S. Thompson shot himself while on the phone with his wife. But all are memorable.

This book is also a tribute, meant to recognize their notable achievements and acknowledge how difficult it must have been to produce and create under sometimes dire circumstances. Their stories are to be handled like eggs, carefully and with kindness. It’s a front-row seat on the lonely, personal nightmares experienced by these legendary luminaries. It concentrates on their final days and the incidents that led up to the moment when they took their last breath, followed by the moment when they no longer could.

Selecting which icons to acknowledge was not easy. Sadly, there were way too many significant suicides to choose from. From the most loved to the most feared, countless personalities have affected our culture and inspired and enthralled us. The people highlighted here were considered essential for a variety of reasons: Sigmund Freud, for being one of the first major documented assisted suicides; Peg Entwistle, for her choice of location; Adolf Hitler, for his enormous impact on history; David Strickland, for ending his life sadly, lonely, and strangely, at the height of his success as an actor.

In most cases, those presented here experienced clear, defining moments or left traceable, tangible pieces of evidence: a suicide note or the giving away of prized possessions, which helped prove that their deaths were intended rather than unintentional. Virginia Woolf put stones in her pockets and then walked into a river, her last words in a note to her husband placed on a mantel in her home. Sylvia Plath left a note and a manuscript; after preparing food for her children and setting it by their beds, she sealed their room, and then her kitchen, turned on the gas oven, and stuck her head in it.

Celebrities who died from an accidental overdose rather than a purposeful decision to end their lives—Hank Williams, Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, John Belushi, Edie Sedgwick, Frida Kahlo, Jimi Hendrix, and, most recently, Heath Ledger—didn’t fall into the suicide category. Some had death wishes—James Dean. And then there were those whose departures remain mysteries: Marilyn Monroe and George Superman Reeves. Murder or suicide? No one knows for sure.

When people heard the title of this book, they were fascinated, eager to learn more, asking for facts I’d uncovered or why this person was chosen as opposed to that one. The truth is, people want to know the gritty, dirty details. They want to unearth the not-so-pretty picture while taking a close look at the bag of bones left behind. It’s human nature to ask what happened upon hearing someone has killed him or herself. How did they do it? and Why did they do it? are often the next questions that slip from their lips when they learned suicide was the culprit.

While writing this introduction, I realized that examining these great people was no different from snooping as a child through the rooms of relatives who had died. Each time I hoped to gain a deeper understanding of my family. I do the same now as I examine these nonconformists. They are the rooms I’ve yet to inspect and the secret compartments that still need opening. Through analyzing their suicide notes, the clues they left, the people they interacted with, and the bizarre and strange behavior they displayed, I hope to gain understanding. It’s the puzzle not yet finished, the questions that still need answers. And of course, there needs to be a final goodbye.

One

Grave Intentions

Suicide has many names: solitaire, intentional self-killing, self-inflicted fatal wounds, and dirt nap. Cops refer to self-murder as doing a dutchie or taking the night train. In Britain, suicide is called topping oneself or soap suds. It doesn’t matter which term you use, the outcome is the same. Many say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Each year in the United States more than thirty-two thousand people succeed at it. Eighty-six Americans do it every day—which works out to one death every sixteen to eighteen minutes. Throughout the world, about two thousand people kill themselves daily. That number more than doubles for unsuccessful suicide attempts.

There is something devastatingly sad about a life ending too soon. It’s the here, and then the not. The clock you can’t turn back. For survivors, those left behind, it’s the heartache. The life you couldn’t save. The constant inner nagging that you didn’t do enough, paired with the unfortunate realization that you did all you could.

More so than ever, celebrity suicide has become a politically hot subject, and we have become almost morbidly curious. I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is, poet and critic Al Alvarez once said of his close friend. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip. Why are we so fixated on these famous suicides, on these brilliant, tortured souls? No detail is too small for our consumption. No information too ghastly for us to hear.

We are interested in the particulars because we are searching for understanding and for something to connect to, says Rebecca Roy, an entertainment industry specialist and psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. It’s projection. All of these people embody something emotionally that resonates for us. We project our own hopes, dreams, and fears onto famous figures, and we then get to watch them played out in front of us.

Knowing the facts surrounding the death of poet Anne Sexton, who draped herself in her mother’s fur before climbing into her car to inhale a garage full of carbon monoxide, helps us understand her pain while feeling closer to her.

The fur was obviously important, and clearly there was a conflict with her mother, says Roy. Who hasn’t felt that? Who wasn’t able to make a relationship work? When we see a piece of ourselves in the story, it intrigues us because we, too, are struggling with those issues. We respond to the story as it propels our transference of our own feelings onto that other person. So when a celebrity that we’ve been invested in dies, it feels like a huge tragedy. Like a piece of us has died as well.

Through these celebrities’ artistic endeavors, their writing, their songs, their appearances on television or in films, or because of the impact they made on history, we feel joined to them somehow. Sometimes we feel closer to these strangers than we do our own neighbors, friends, and family. We let these larger-than-life personalities into our homes, our lives, and our hearts. We think we’ve earned the right to mourn because we feel incredibly and indelibly linked to them. The more we see, the more we witness, the closer and more united to them we feel. Thanks to twenty-four-hour TV coverage, gossip magazines, newspapers, websites, and reality shows, we’ve become an instant-gratification media generation, constantly exposed to the celebrities we idolize—all of which has fueled this sense of false intimacy.

Many of us have followed celebrities’ careers. We have watched them fall in love, get married, have children, and become divorced. We have seen them struggle publicly as we struggle privately. We have been assigned their books in school, bought their CDs, memorized their lyrics, even quoted them in our yearbooks. Since we have a front-row seat into their lives, we are there to champion their triumphs, and share their hurt and disappointment when they are defeated. We witness their awards speeches, we are present at their concerts and theater performances, we have seen their masterpieces hanging in museums, and we’ve attended their readings at bookstores. We have gathered at their political rallies, listened to their lectures, and watched the way they’ve changed the world.

Aside from suffering from projection, there’s the fairy dust phenomenon to contend with. We assume if we’re near these celebrities and famous figures, their magic or good fortune will rub off on us, Roy explains, adding that we think that by reading their books, watching their interviews, and learning as much as possible about them, their secrets for success will be revealed to us.

Given our obsession with celebrities and interest in things that are taboo, and the fact that they died and that it was a suicide, gives their death some significance and thus, a heightened interest, says Dr. David Lester, Ph.D., a suicidologist who has studied self-killing for over forty years. Most people have suicidal and self-destructive impulses and spend a lifetime repressing them. These celebrities acted on them. That, paired with their fame and our feeling of connection, heightens the interest we already have.

And we need them—to show us that the impossible is not, to utter what we are unable to verbalize. They are underdogs overcoming adversity as we watch them do it. We want to save them, and yet be saved by them. So we allow them their bad behavior, grant latitude to their extreme mood swings.

We also love their brilliance and their genius. The contributions they made to history are fingerprints carved with a sharp knife, its indentation a valley of inerasable crevices. And so, the loss seems that much sadder, its impact that much greater. We fall prey to their good looks and their artistic talents. We’re dazzled by their glamorous lives and wooed by their entrance into an exclusive club we long to be members of.

When they kill themselves, our shock factor is heightened. We can’t fathom how someone with wealth, beauty, and fame could be so miserable. We think someone with all those external achievements has to be happy, Roy says. When we see someone who we think has everything going for them, and they kill themselves, it confuses us. It throws our values into question. And disrupts our belief that fame cures all ills. What people really desire, we think, is validation. We want to be wanted and loved. When someone has gotten that validation, and still commits suicide, we are puzzled. We need to know more.

Suicide and darkness have long plagued the ultra-creative. Their self-destructive vices and passion for excess follow them like a trail of empty bottles, and often beg the chicken-or-egg question. Is it their sadness that makes them so brilliantly creative, or does their brilliance and ability to create induce their sadness?

Dating back to Plato—who often spoke about creative individuals and how they were susceptible to melancholy—we have separated clinical insanity from creative insanity. Seneca is often quoted as saying, There never has been great talent without a touch of madness. Even nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb noted the too-close-for-comfort connection in The Sanity of True Genius: So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity; the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found in the sanest writers.

There’s no disagreeing that death obsessions, pain, and deep complexity are themes of artistic geniuses’ work, that they define their material. When famed abstract artist Mark Rothko gave a lecture at the Pratt Institute on the ingredients and recipe for making a work of art, he stated, There must be a clear preoccupation with death. He continued by adding in some sensuality, mixing in tension and irony, wit and play for the human element, and a touch of the ephemeral, and chance. Stir and let sit, then end with hope. Ten percent to make the tragic concept more endurable, he insisted.

The failure of his band Attila led Billy Joel, a then depressed alcoholic, to attempt suicide in late 1970 by drinking furniture polish. It looked tastier than bleach, he shared in Hank Bordowitz’s biography of the singer-songwriter, Billy Joel: The Life and Times of an Angry Young Man. The suicide note he left later became the lyrics to his song Tomorrow Is Today.

And there isn’t an art historian who will deny that van Gogh did some of his most impressive, most important work—like many others in this book—while in the throes of a deep depression. Starry Night was created while van Gogh was in a mental institution. The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, so much more am I an artist, a creative artist, he once admitted, adding that he put his heart and soul into his work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Much of their selves ends up in their opuses. They vomit up their feelings, hoping it will empty them out. And yet, each morning or evening, after a drink or two or three, after the pills have stopped working and the drugs have worn off and they’ve returned from Oz, they are still filled with pain, stuck with their inner devils and demons. After choking on their sadness and drowning in genius, suicide seems like a suitable solution, instant relief from a lifetime of agony. More than the body of work an icon creates, what will forever define him becomes his suicidal act. The intriguing stories around his death make him a shadowy figure who lurks in the forefront. A ghost who hovers.

Our attraction to famous figures is a relatively new phenomenon, occurring over the past two hundred years. It started with the American Revolution, cites Leo Braudy, a cultural historian and author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. We’re the first country that existed on purpose. We decided what our flag would look like and what’s our symbolic code. Everything was done from scratch and so we developed heroes.

Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson—our first American Idols, so to speak—received VIP treatment while being indoctrinated with star status. Braudy says that this phenomenon is in a way similar to the treatment that Louis XIV gave to himself, but we did it for democratic reasons, and was the unprecedented fame of how celebrity evolved.

In the 1920s and ’30s, film studios tried to keep any gossip or negativity concerning its contract actors out of the papers. Today that information is an important part of celebrity journalism.

People have been interested in powerful individuals for centuries, adds Joshua Gamson, author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. The interest hasn’t changed, but the supply of people has. Today, when anyone can be a star, there’s less distance and we can identify with them more easily, so our attachment is increased. We think, ‘They’re like me.’ It’s like a friend or a peer dying rather than a God.

Gamson also differentiates between what we call a celebrity, and heroic figures who did something extraordinary and contributed to our nation. Those people are the more traditional kind of fame created from merit or spectacular contribution, whether positive or negative, he says. Their fame is tied to their achievement, which is different from today’s media-generated celebrity or where people are famous for being themselves. In this case, the loss for us tends to be more fascinating and adorning. Rather than merely feeling we knew them—as we do with celebrities today—we feel a larger loss, that the collective world has lost something.

Suicide was once viewed as noble and heroic. In ancient Greece and Rome, forced suicide was a common form of execution, reserved mostly for aristocrats sentenced to death. Victims would ingest hemlock or fall on their swords. Offenders who knew they’d be punished harshly for breaking the law often took their own lives so their families could retain their property rights and belongings. Otherwise, the government could win ownership. As Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, society’s views on suicide gradually changed. By the sixth century, the once honorable act became a punishable sin. Christian burial laws soon stated that if you wanted a welcoming invitation to heaven, suicide was a big no-no. In AD 693, a mere attempt at suicide was seen as a crime, and one was harshly reprimanded for it, excommunicated from the church and subject to civil consequences.

The Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—think Byron and Keats—are to blame for glorifying and beautifying suicide. One of the first notables was seventeen-year-old British poet Thomas Chatterton, who, in 1770, tore his literary work into fragments before ingesting arsenic. A few years later he gained iconic notoriety as an unacknowledged genius for the Romantics. And during the French Revolution, suicide ceased to be a crime in many European countries.

As times changed, so did our opinions. Suicide has been looked at philosophically, ethically, religiously, and legally from antiquity into the nineteenth century. The 1800s brought with it a sociological/statistical inquiry paired with a psychological examination—posing the question Why would someone kill himself?—while the pill-popping Polly Prozacs of the 1970s gave us the birth of anti-psychosis drugs such as Thorazine, and with it, the concept of a biochemical imbalance that has breathed new life into the analysis and prevention of suicidal tendencies and behaviors.

An estimated 75 percent of successful and would-be suicides give warning signs of their intensions. Many are driven to the act because their red flags or cries for help go ignored or unnoticed, which means at a certain point, someone will kill themselves in order to prove her seriousness.

Very often, suicide is about control, says Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman, a leading suicidologist who has published close to two papers and twenty books on the topic. "It’s the only time you can control death. You can control the exact hour, minute, day, and date. You call the shots. Nature can’t do this to me; I’ll do it to me." Suicide also violates the basic rule in life: don’t do something you can’t come back from. We want to comfort ourselves against the coldness of loneliness, and suicide is a surrender to that method of controlling one’s own fate, Schneidman adds.

In 1999, concern for the number of suicides that were occurring was serious enough for the surgeon general to issue a Call to Action to Prevent Suicide, defining it as a public health hazard. And according to

Reviews for Death Becomes Them

[meggyweg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Certainly this was quite an interesting book, profiling cases of many famous people (almost all from the twentieth or twenty-first century, a few from the latter half the 1800s). However I am a bit uneasy about accuracy. One of the reviews below says the Sylvia Plath entry contained many inaccuracies, and in the "sources" section it said Wikipedia was a major source. I love Wikipedia as much as anyone else but it's hardly unimpeachable.Nevertheless, a book worth your time reading if you are interested in the subject.

[pksteinberg · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

If the article on "Sylvia Plath" in Alix Strauss' Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, & the Notorious (Harper Collins, 2009) is typical of the others in the book, the general population that reads this work will, in the company of those who know something of the subject discussed, make fools of themselves.There are some truly heinous mistakes in the Plath piece. I forced myself not to jump right to Plath and read with interest about Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson. I looked forward to Anne Sexton after Plath. I admit I don't know much about the suicides of the other people in the book, but after the Plath chapter I was so completely turned off to the point that the book in my hand was replaced by chocolate.There are far too many errors for me to try to correct here, but I'll just list a few because I cannot help myself. Before I continue, however, I do have to say that the book I received, kindly from Strauss' publicist, is an advanced, uncorrected proof. Some of these errors may have been corrected before the book was published. The copy of the book I browsed briefly in a Borders book store seemed to be very similar, textually speaking, to my proof copy. In writing this, I am reminded of something my mother always said to me: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I've always been a bit stubborn (comments to the blog on this point will be removed).The format will follow my previous reviews that have warrented such scrutiny. I'll list the page number, the quote from the book, followed by the "correction" or some other snarky or potentially offensive comment.Pg 57"Born: October 27, 1932, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts." - Nope. Born in Boston, Massachusetts."Died: February 11, 1963, Court Green House, Devon England." - Nope. Plath died at 23 Fitzroy Road, London, England. Inconsistently, the location was correct later in the text."Discovered by: The nanny" - Nope. Myra Norris was a nurse not a nanny; and the construction person was a construction person. Inconsistently, Norris' occupation was correct later in the text."Funeral: Among the long list of eminent writers present at her funeral, close friend Anne Sexton gave a touching eulogy and talked openly about the two women's attraction to suicide." - Seriously? Is this fiction? This is grotesquely inaccurate and unintentionally laughable. The only eminent writer at her funeral was her husband.At the risk of this review starting to look like Letters Home or The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), ... ... (omission) ... ...Pg 61"It took only a few months [following their wedding] for Ted to have an affair, with Assia Wevill..." - Nope. Way wrong."By 1960 Sylvia and Ted each had dueling books of poetry published..." - Not really. Scales were heavily in Hughes' favor.Pg 62"[At the time of her death Plath left] Ariel and Other Poems... on the table near the front door, like a present waiting to be opened." - No. The manuscript was in her study.Pg 63"...a folded towel acted as a substitute for a blanket, which she used to support her head on the stove's open door." - No. A report at the time of her death indicates that her head was deep in the oven.Pg 64"On February 15, friends and family piled into St. Pancras County Court..." - Not quite accurate."Shortly after Sylvia's funeral, her friend Elizabeth was sent a letter by Assia, now Ted's wife." - Nope. Ted Hughes never married Assia Wevill. He did refer to her in a letter as his "true wife" at one point, but as far as I know astrological or cosmic marriage is not a recognized form of marriage.There is more, the following comments on inaccuracies and errors in the book are from Gail Crowther. I'd quote at length from Strauss' text but likely won't obtain permission to reprint the WHOLE THING.p. 59 Aurelia Plath wasn't at the movies during SP's first suicide attempt but at her friend's house watching a recording of the coronation of Elizabeth II on her televison.p. 61 The order of the writing of the poems is just all wrong, wrong, wrong.p. 62 SP moved to London with the "naivete of a child" - What??? Has Strauss never read her letters?p. 62 I believe from other sources that Horder sent SP the name of a female psychiatrist who he thought would be suitable but that the letter arrived after her death.p. 62 SP 'wrote several notes' the night of her suicide - Sources/Evidence for this claim?p. 63 'tea soaked clothes' - This detail is not mentioned in the inquest notes or the recording of the inquest. They were simply described as clothes and tape.p. 63 'as if finishing the botched job she began twenty years before' - 20 years after her first attempt? ... So she was 10 then the first time she tried??? You're reading "Lady Lazarus" too literally.p. 63 Plath was on the National Health Service, thus pills were free. Thus, gas was more expensive than pills.p. 63 SP died at 6am? I thought Horder claimed she was still warm at 10.30 and therefore he thought she had died around 8am?p. 63 Trevor Thomas was neither unconscious nor taken to hospital. According to his account he woke groggy in the afternoon, went to work to apologise and Horder looked him over and told him he had been affected by the gas.p. 63 The quote on SP's grave is not from the Bhagavad Gita but from the Buddhist text 'Monkey' by Wu Ch'Eng-En.p. 65 Assia Wevill was not "expecting TH home" they had just got back from a trip to Manchester and they didn't live together anyway.p. 66 Assia Wevill didn't use water to wash down her pills - it was orange juice for Shura and whisky for herself.And, there is still more! I'd include them but don't want to appear to be too nit-picky.Each article in Death Becomes Them includes an "Unearthed" section as well as other bits of information such as career highlights. The Unearthed section, I thought, would reveal something new about the Plath's death, but for Plath is was just a summary of or brief history of British suicides by coal gas. Like Plath when she visited her father's grave in Winthrop, I felt cheated. Following the main text on Plath, there is a section called "Two Wives, Same Method" - which of course is wrong from the start as, we know, Ted Hughes's second wife - at this time of writing - is still living. Thus also, Hughes could not have been Assia's fourth husband, as is claimed on page 66.The section on Nicholas Hughes' suicide earlier this year is painful to read. I suppose Strauss couldn't help herself? Lastly, the Career Highlights is equally flawed. According this this, The Journals of Sylvia Plath won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. No. That would be Plath's Collected Poems. The final sentence is off the mark, as well, "Today, two of her journals are on exhibition at Smith College, where they will remain until 2013, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of her death." What I think she meant was that two journals were sealed until 2013; however, 11 years ago these were unsealed and were included in Karen V. Kukil's The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath published in 2000. The reliance on earlier Plath biographies is apparent.Even a little carefully conducted research could have avoided 95% of these errors. It's really a shame that some bad facts just keep getting recycled by careless, clumsy, or otherwise lazy, presumably hasty writing. There is very little either new or interesting or unearthed about Plath or her suicide in this chapter - which is really, as a coworker of mine said, the only thing I care about. It is writing like this that pulls the focus clearly away from Plath's writing and wrongfully places it after her life. Perhaps I'm just over-deathed at the moment, having just finished a book about Jack the Ripper, but I found the work excessively and obsessively morbid. Alix Strauss' coverage of Sylvia Plath in Death Becomes Them is potentially one of the worst pieces of writing on Plath I've ever read. Big statement.Stepping off the soapbox now.